"Security Challenges in Transatlantic Relations."
Charles Grant
in: Transatlantic Internationale Politik, 2/2003.
In the immediate aftermath of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, the spirit of solidarity that unified the two sides of the Atlantic was palpable. Most Europeans knew that al Qaeda could have attacked their own cities in just the same way. Many of them thought that the US-led war in Afghanistan was a just war and that the overthrow of the Taliban made Europe, like the United States, a safer place.
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Beitrag erschienen in: Transatlantic Internationale Politik 2/2003 |
On the European side, presidents and prime ministers have become frustrated by the tendency of the administration of George W. Bush to act without consulting allies (as in the military campaign in Afghanistan); by its reluctance to be constrained by international treaties and organizations (saying No to the Kyoto protocol, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and an enforcement mechanism for the Biological Weapons Convention); and by its enthusiasm for deploying the hard sort of power, as opposed to the softer sorts (such as peacekeeping, economic aid, and other contributions to nation-building).
On the American side, senior figures in the administration have found the Europeans parochial in their world-view, slovenly in their reaction to the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and pathetic in their military capabilities. Some commentators have even responded to criticisms of America’s Middle East policy by accusing the Europeans of instinctive antisemitism.
Max Boot, a respected analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, echoed the private views of some within the administration when he wrote that ”Europe has a long history of appeasing terrorists and rogue rulers, from Mohamar Gadhafi to Saddam Hussein.” He said that Europeans felt free to ignore the threat from Iraq ”because they have got into the habit of outsourcing their protection to the US.” Boot continued: ”On issue after issue, America acts, Europe acts up … The Europeans have adopted the attitude of a petulant 16-year old toward his parents. Oh well, that’s what the Americans get for being the grown-up in this relationship.”
Some Europeans are no more polite in their criticisms of the Bush administration, and in particular of the ”hawks” around Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The nature of transatlantic disputes is changing, and the tone is becoming more cantankerous. This matters, because many of the world’s most pressing problems become much harder to solve if the US and the European Union are not working together effectively. When they pull in the same direction, Europe and America can galvanize the rest of the world into action.
So how have transatlantic security relations reached their current, troubled state? This article tracks some of the causes and, drawing in part on the work of Steven Everts, suggests how Americans and Europeans can work together to improve the situation.
Sources of Tension
The end of the cold war shifted the primary focus of transatlantic cooperation from the European to the global arena, where Americans and Europeans often disagree. Furthermore, many Americans do not see a strong case for taking European preferences into account in dealing with extra-European problems—even when the EU does have a unified position, which often it does not.
”They differ on the nature and urgency of the problems to be addressed (the ‘mad men and loose nukes agenda’ versus the ‘dark side of globalization’),” Everts wrote in the International Spectator. ”And they have even more divergent assessments of what sort of strategy works in dealing with these problems (prioritizing ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ security, opting for unilateral action versus multilateral cooperation, and so on.)”
It is now clear that September 11 accentuated these differences in world outlook. Americans are focused largely on the ”global war against terrorism.” This in turn has strengthened the influence of the hardliners in the US administration and reduced America’s willingness to consult allies.
Most Europeans, however, do not feel at war. They fret about what they regard as an American tendency to reduce complex global problems to the neat template of the war against terror. Thus many Europeans criticized President Bush’s famous ‘Axis of Evil’ speech (of January 2002) for conflating terrorism with weapons proliferation. Both are serious problems, but they are analytically distinct and require different policy responses. Yet Americans worry about the indifference with which some European governments treat the threat of WMD.
Against this backdrop, there appear to be four proximate reasons for the current malaise.
Israel-Palestine
The problem here is not that the US and the European governments are far apart, at least in their declared policies. The so-called Quartet, consisting of Secretary of State Colin Powell, the United Nations’ Kofi Annan, the EU’s Javier Solana, and Russia’s Igor Ivanov, has just about succeeded in maintaining a common front. The different EU governments have their own emphases, but agree—as does the US State Department—on the fundamentals of what needs to be done: an exchange of land for peace. However, sharp differences within the US administration—with hard-liners such as Rumsfeld talking of the ”so-called occupied territories”—have weakened the effectiveness of the Quartet.
A more basic problem is that on this issue, unlike most others in transatlantic relations, public opinion cares deeply but thinks differently on each side of the Atlantic. Most Europeans think the aggressive response of the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the suicide bombings has made the situation much worse, and that the US is not putting enough pressure on Sharon to negotiate a peace settlement. Many Americans support Sharon in his refusal to negotiate with Palestinians, so long as Israel is the victim of suicide bombings.
When public opinion takes an interest in foreign policy, it is liable to influence politicians. Last April the European Parliament passed (non-binding) motions calling for sanctions against Israel, while the Israeli lobby in the US forced George Bush to back down after he had told Sharon to withdraw Israeli forces from Palestinian lands ”without delay.”
The more public opinion influences foreign policy on the two sides of the Atlantic, the harder it becomes for senior politicians in the EU and the US to maintain a common line on Israel-Palestine. In the autumn of 2002 Tony Blair was one of the European politicians who urged the US to convene a Mideast peace conference; the White House was not interested.
And at the end of the year, when the Quartet was planning to publish a ”road map” to set out the stages by which the Palestinians would achieve statehood, Sharon intervened with President Bush to ensure that no road map would appear before the Israeli elections of January 2003. The White House also sought to alter the wording of the road map to make it less favorable to the Palestinians—to the consternation of Annan, Ivanov, and Solana. European diplomats are left frustrated; they believe that current US policies are doing little to promote the peace process, yet they know that if they oppose the US and come up with their own plan—thereby alienating Israel—they will achieve nothing.
The Iraq War and the Military Gap
Last autumn every EU member supported the tough UN Security Council resolution 1441 on weapons inspections. Nonetheless, European and American perceptions of the threat were very different. Most European leaders did not agree that Iraq was as big a danger to world peace as al Qaeda. Unlike Bush and his advisers, they thought that containment and deterrence could prevent Saddam from using his weapons of mass destruction against people outside Iraq. And they feared that a war against Iraq would absorb energy and effort from the war against terrorism.
Of course, the big European countries had their own, varied approaches in the runup to war, with the United Kingdom apparently prepared to support whatever President Bush decided, France leading the effort to maintain the authority of the UN, and Germany refusing to take military action in any circumstances. Nevertheless, public opinion in the various European countries was strikingly similar in supporting a war only if it were specifically backed by a second UN resolution (which was never agreed on). And most European leaders shared the same strategic objective of keeping the US within a multilateral framework. Indeed, European leaders were so concerned about the dangers of US unilateralism that they were ready to sign up to almost anything in an effort to keep America working with the UN.
In the military realm, throughout the cold war and the decade thereafter, the ratio of defense spending between NATO’s European members and the US was remarkably constant: the Europeans spent about 60 percent of US outlays. But that ratio dropped to close to 40 percent in the last three years as the US defense budget rose from $280 billion in 1999 to close to $400 billion in 2002 and European spending remained roughly constant.
Budgets are only part of the problem, for the Europeans continue to spend too much money on old technologies and large, conscript armies, rather than new technologies and small, mobile forces. European armies lack the new communications technologies that allow the Americans to engage in ”network-centric warfare,” in which a commander can watch on a single screen the deployment of friendly and hostile forces in a battlespace, in real time, and then order precision strikes. American generals complain that it is becoming increasingly difficult to work alongside Europeans. Following the experience of the Kosovo air campaign, during which the European performance was underwhelming, the Pentagon chose to run the Afghan war on its own terms. US commanders spurned offers of military help from NATO allies, at least in the early phases of the war.
European governments did not respond to the Afghan war by boosting defense budgets (Britain and France excepted), purchasing badly-needed capabilities, or accelerating the pace of military reform. But they did grumble about American contempt for NATO, the lack of consultation, and the rebuffing of European offers.
EU Disunity
At a time of new and dangerous global threats, the Europeans have failed to strengthen either their Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) or their European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). Javier Solana, the High Representative for the CFSP, has earned some credit for his deal-making in Macedonia and Montenegro. But the CFSP remains hamstrung by the system of the rotating presidency, whereby a new member state takes over every six months.
As for the embryonic ESDP, any mention of it in Washington in recent years has been liable to provoke laughter rather than interest or respect. The ESDP was supposed to take over NATO’s peacekeeping job in Macedonia in January 2003. But a two-year Greek-Turkish argument about EU access to NATO assets blocked progress until December 2002 and postponed that date by three months. The gap between the proud rhetoric with which the Europeans launched the ESDP and its hitherto unimpressive performance only reinforces the argument of those Americans who claim that the EU will never be a serious global player and is nothing more than an economic club.
Four Suggestions for the US
1.The US must think twice before embarking on unilateral actions and make an effort to act within the framework of international organizations and agreements.
Of course, there will be occasions when a US administration reckons that the national interest requires it to disregard an international agreement, or to work without the UN. But the US must be aware that there is a price to be paid for acting unilaterally. As Harvard’s Joseph Nye has observed, the more the US behaves in a unilateral manner, the more its ”soft” power is liable to diminish. The consequence is likely to be an increase in anti-American sentiment in other countries; greater difficulty in putting together international coalitions; and a higher chance that other governments would block US objectives in international fora.
Some figures within the Bush administration appear to appreciate these arguments. There were even moments in 2002 when Washington seemed to be trying hard to be multilateralist. For example, by the time of the Prague summit in November, America’s allies had been reassured that the administration cared about the future of NATO. A very different message had come from some quarters of the Pentagon in the preceding winter. Indeed, the National Security Council thought up the new NATO Response Force as a way of ensuring that the Pentagon could make use of European offers of military support.
But on arms control there is not much sign that the Department of Defense has toned down its hostility to international treaties. The Pentagon evidently had some input into the National Security Strategy that President Bush approved in September. That document’s statement that the US might need to take preemptive action against a serious threat to its security was not in itself new or shocking; any government would want to reserve that right. But such a doctrine of preemption raises obvious questions for global governance, such as who judges what is a serious threat, and whether some countries may be tempted to use the doctrine as an excuse to launch wars of their own. The document’s failure to address such questions, combined with the scarcity of references to NATO and coalition warfare (with the EU picking up just one reference in 31 pages), left many Europeans perturbed.
2. The US should remember that the style of its diplomacy affects outcomes. In late 2002 its feud with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and its intervention on behalf of Turkey’s application to join the EU illustrated how the dearth of American diplomacy may lead to results that are sub-optimal from the US point of view. Schröder’s criticism of the US over Iraq was a cynical and populist attempt to tap the anti-American sentiments of many East German voters in a tight election. Yet Schröder’s anti-war stance may have been reinforced by a Cheney speech in August that out of the blue shifted US policy to call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
There was genuine annoyance in Berlin about the lack of consultation. The German defense ministry (like its British counterpart) complained that the Pentagon had not answered its letters offering forces for Afghanistan, and that Pentagon officials were too busy to see them or return calls. Schröder was not wise or justified in letting anti-American rhetoric color his election campaign. However, if the US had handled a key ally more sensitively, Schröder would probably not have spoken in the way that he did.
Similarly, the heavy US diplomacy on behalf of Turkey’s de facto leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and call for EU membership negotiations to start in 2003 may have been counterproductive. If the US, besides lauding Turkey, had promised to use its influence to help Ankara overcome barriers to Turkish membership—such as intervention by the Turkish army in politics, the practice of torture in police stations, imprisonment of peaceful Kurdish-rights activists, and the dire state of the economy—this would have had a positive impact on European opinion.
Instead, while tough American pressure did induce a German government that was keen to mend fences with the US to push for Turkish membership, it soured governments in France and the Nordic countries.
3. Whatever the US wishes to do in postwar Iraq, it should make every effort to keep a broad international coalition with it. Otherwise, the impact of the unilateralist US war could be to divide the EU governments, diminish British influence in the EU (and severely damage Tony Blair’s stature in the UK and the rest of Europe), weaken the EU’s common foreign and security policy, and undermine the authority of the UN. American hawks should not assume that such consequences would be good for US interests.
However, European leaders must understand that if they want to encourage the US to act multilaterally, they must work with the US and be prepared to back the use of force as an option in hard cases,
4. The US should try to appear even-handed on the Mideast. Most of the world outside the US and Israel thinks the US is prepared to be tough on the Palestinians but not on the Sharon government. This perception has a huge impact on America’s prestige and reputation, not only in Arab lands, but all over the world. After military victory in Iraq it will be much easier for the US to build a credible future coalitions if at the same time it makes a priority of advancing the Israel-Palestine peace process.
The European governments and the State Department agree that, left to his own devices, Sharon is unlikely to offer enough to engage the Palestinians in serious peace talks. Divisions between the State Department and the Defense Department over the peace process are damaging to American influence in the region. The president needs to ensure that his administration has one line on the Mideast. He should also recognize—as the State Department certainly does—that while the US must be the leading external party in the peace process, it can achieve more by working with the EU and the other members of the Quartet.
Four Suggestions for the EU
1. The European governments must enhance their military capabilities. They need to spend more money on capabilities such as communications, precision-guided munitions, airlift, tanker aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the suppression of enemy air defenses. And they need more troops that can engage in high-intensity warfare outside Europe.
The hope must be that commitments agreed to at the NATO summit in Prague last November can succeed where the EU has failed to make an impact, NATO may succeed. The NATO heads of government approved eight specific capability goals, to replace the 58 goals of the earlier Defense Capabilities Initiative—which were too many to be taken seriously. And particular governments have agreed to take responsibility for the implementation of each of the eight goals. It was also encouraging that groups of NATO governments signed up to some hard numbers, such as the procurement of 10 to 15 refuelling aircraft, and a 40 percent increase in the stock of satellite-guided bombs. Furthermore, the NATO countries finally agreed to develop a fleet of airborne ground surveillance aircraft, on the AWACS model. Those aircraft, like all the other new capabilities, would of course be available for NATO or EU missions.
Hopefully, too, the new NATO Reaction Force, which is designed to fight alongside American elite forces in dangerous situations, will spur the Europeans to enhance the quality of their own cutting-edge troops and speed up sluggish military reforms.
The Europeans need to spend their defense budgets more wisely. But they also need to spend more—mainly because bigger budgets produce better capabilities, but also because they need to show the Americans that they are serious. All EU countries should aspire to spend at least 2.5 percent of GDP on defense (the British and French levels). They should also agree to spend 20 percent of their defense budgets on procurement and research and development.
The European Union leaders should also be bolder in exploring the pooling of capabilities. In areas such as air transport, maintenance of fighter aircraft, medical facilities, and the delivery of supplies, much money could be saved through the creation of pooled operations. The cooperative examples of NATO’s existing AWACS and future airborne ground surveillance fleets should be more widely followed.
2. The Europeans need to show that they take the threats of WMD and their proliferation seriously. Many European governments have long experience of dealing with terrorism and do not underestimate its dangers. But they have tended to be nonchalant about the risks of unguarded nuclear materials in Soviet successor countries, as well as the dangers of rogue states acquiring chemical and biological weapons, or ballistic missiles. Over the past decade the US has spent $7 billion on helping post-Soviet countries decommission nuclear weapons and manage nuclear materials; the EU countries have spent only $1 billion. Similarly, while the US has been fretting about Russian support—much of it indirect—for Iran’s nuclear power program, EU governments appear unconcerned about the prospect of Iranian construction of a bomb.
And yet European proliferation experts are right to argue that, despite the evident weaknesses of arms-control regimes, some of them are genuinely useful. America’s opposition to these regimes sometimes appears to be ideological, as when the State Department’s arms-control chief John Bolton opposes any constraint on America’s freedom of maneuver; and sometimes it seems to be the result of corporate lobbying, as when pharmaceutical companies oppose the proposed inspection regime of the Biological Weapons Convention.
Surely there is scope for a grand transatlantic bargain on proliferation. The US should sign up to some of the binding regimes, such as the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the UN Convention on Small Arms. In return the Europeans should agree to champion more effective and tougher action against the threat of proliferation. For example, they could offer more cash for dealing with the problem of Russia’s nuclear weapons facilities; they could support harder sanctions against countries that proliferate; and, when there is a convincing case for preemptive action, they could join the US in military missions to destroy WMD that threaten the peace.
Overhaul of ESDP
3. The Europeans need to overhaul the institutions of their foreign and defense policy, so that the EU becomes a more effective and coherent external actor. Countries outside the EU often find it a nightmare to deal with, because of slow decision-making, the rotating presidency, and the multiplicity of spokesmen on external issues.
The intergovernmental European Council, the EU’s supreme authority, is becoming increasingly unwieldy and ineffective. The EU’s imminent enlargement means that there will soon be 25 leaders around the table. Most of the EU’s larger countries have therefore proposed a new, full-time chairman or president for the European Council, who would speak for Europe at the highest level. Many small member states oppose this idea—mainly because they fear it would weaken the Commission—but it may yet appear in the EU constitution that is now being drafted.
One reform that is likely to be approved is the merging of the Council’s High Representative for foreign policy (currently Solana) and the supranational Commissioner for external relations (currently Chris Patten). A single ”foreign minister” with links both to the Commission and the Council would then represent the EU to the rest of the world and gain the right to make proposals. The rotating presidency would be abolished in its current form, while the Council of foreign ministers might start to take some decisions by majority vote rather than unanimity.
On the ESDP, too, there are cautious grounds for optimism. Turkey has withdrawn its veto over links between the EU and NATO. Henceforth the EU will have assured access to NATO planning facilities and can thus start to plan its first military missions. beginning in the Balkans
4. The EU should learn to use policies on trade and aid to support its political objectives. The EU should link the granting of trade privileges and financial assistance to clear commitments from recipient countries to promote political and economic reform. The EU’s ties to less-developed countries are often governed by trade and cooperation, association, or other sorts of agreements. These usually contain clauses on the respect of human rights, political pluralism, and standards of good governance. Armed with these clauses, the EU should be able to wield considerable influence. In practice, however, ultra-cautious member states are often reluctant to invoke the relevant clauses, perhaps because they worry about damage to their commercial interests.
The EU should summon the courage to link non-compliance with human-rights clauses to concrete actions, such as the postponement of new projects, the suspension of high-level contacts, or the use of different channels of delivery (such as independent NGOs, rather than government-run bodies). Using a benchmarking process, EU foreign ministers should offer extra EU and national assistance to countries that perform well at political and economic modernization, but punish those that slip back.
Hitherto the EU has imposed sanctions only on the most egregious offenders, such as Zimbabwe and Belarus. It needs to become more confident about linking the economic and diplomatic sides of its foreign policy. The result would be a more influential EU, and thus a more useful partner for the US.
Americans need to remember that they cannot accomplish many of their global objectives—such as tackling terrorism, proliferation and the drugs trade, or dealing with Arab state failure, or integrating Russia and China into the world system – without allies. And the European countries, for all their evident flaws, still have considerable international clout and are the most like-minded countries that the US is going to be able to work with.
If Europe can become a more useful partner, the US will have stronger incentives to work with it. It is in the interests of both that the transatlantic bond should remain the closest between any two continents.
Charles Grant is director of the Centre for European Reform, London
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